Pregnant Karina with Tarantula Nebula

I visualize this as a picture of my RPG character Karina (not the transhuman version) aboard a colony transport far beyond the borders of her native Third Imperium, well into her third trimester with twin girls fathered by her old friend Heinz Schiessen. Karina and Heinz joined the transport along with their friend Kaffe after Kaffe shared a psychic premonition of the utter destruction of their native Third Imperium (which actually happened in the canon history of GDW's Traveller RPG as a cybernetic lifeform called the Virus extinguished most life throughout known space). As noted in Empress Karina with friends, the actual original Karina campaign ended very differently with Karina using awesome psionic powers to make herself empress of the Imperium and end the civil war which would have led to the release of the Virus. However, I feel that I was allowed to make Karina too powerful in that campaign and I think this alternate storyline is more plausible.

(Of course it might seem rash for Karina to have babies amidst such uncertainty, but Karina was partly motivated by Heinz's advancing years. Although Karina and Heinz are the same age (about 60), Karina is still well-preserved and fertile because of her Vilani genes while Heinz is aging much more quickly because of his Solomani genes.)

The background image is a slightly-modified version of this picture of the Tarantula Nebula ( [link] ) from NASA, combining imagery from NASA's Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer space observatories. Also known as 30 Doradus or NGC 2070, this nebula is a very energetic star-forming region noted for its exceptional luminosity, ablaze with the light of numerous young giant and supergiant stars; despite being in the Large Magellanic Cloud outside our galaxy and more than 150,000 light-years from Earth, the nebula has an apparent visual magnitude of 8 (beyond the limits of normal naked-eye skywatching, but resolvable in even a small astronomical telescope). (Persons familiar with the Traveller RPG might note that human starships were never known to travel so far from our solar neighborhood, but ~ artistic license aside ~ maybe there's a wormhole or such allowing the ship to travel so far.)